READY TO PARTY: MUMIA ABU-JAMAL AND THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY

Prologue:

JOINING THE PARTY

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense may have been a
flash in the pan. But that flash provided illumination. Wes Cook, a teenager
from Philadelphia who later re-named himself Mumia Abu-Jamal, found friends
and an outlet for his energy in the electricity created by the Party. He
also found his life’s purpose as a communicator. In short, he found
himself.

Cook was born in Philadelphia in 1954, the same year the
NAACP’s Brown vs. Board school desegregation victory. (As a direct result of
the Supreme Court’s action, Mississippi segregationists formed the first
White Citizen’s Council.) Meanwhile, three "race men" were making moves that
reverberate into the 21st century. The first, a young Muslim
minister, was traveling around the nation, speaking at meetings of an
organization called the Lost-Found Nation of Islam. (At one of these
meetings in 1954, he had "openly spoken against the ‘white devils’ and has
encouraged greater hatred on the part of the cult towards the white race,"
said the man’s FBI file.) Before Cook’s second birthday, another young
minister, this one a Christian from Alabama, announced he would help to lead
a bus boycott so Blacks would be able to get the respect they earned as
paying passengers. The third, a scholar named Ralph Bunche, was appointed as
the second-in-command of the United Nations.

Like many of the Baby Boom generation, Cook came of age
with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. He was 10 when Philadelphia
became one of the first American cities to go up in flames kindled by racial
and economic injustice. He was 12 in 1966—a year after the young Muslim
minister was killed.

Two community college students in Oakland, California,
acted on the minister’s suggestion that Blacks form rifle clubs to defend
themselves. They wanted to see if revolution could come to the United States
the same way it had come in Cuba and several African nations—through a guns’
barrel. The duo, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, formed a left-leaning
political organization. The new group emphasized community service,
political education and self-defense against attacks from Oakland’s racist
white police force. Stokely Carmichael, a civil rights activist with the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was organizing an independent
political party in Lowndes County, Ala., to test Blacks’ newly won voting
power. Seale and Newton asked to adopt the party’s name and symbol, a black
panther, as their own. Carmichael and the other SNCC organizers had no
complaint.

Wes Cook—nicknamed "Scout" or "United Nations" in his
neighborhood—wasn’t paying much attention to all this. His world was home
and family, spinning stories to his friends and burying himself in the
monthly comicbook adventures of Spider-Man. He was called "Scout" because,
in the words of his official biographer, Terry Bisson, "he was always on the
lookout for something—a construction site, a new candy, a dead dog, a
grapevine." Bisson writes that the "United Nations" moniker stuck because
Cook would tell the other neighborhood children about "the Quakers who ran
the settlement house; about the Jews and their synagogue. He knew all about
the Ukrainians who lived a few blocks north, and the Italians who lived to
the west and south."

Something closer to home helped place him on the
Panther’s path. In 1967—following urban insurrections in more than 100
cities, including Detroit and Newark—Student Power and Black Power combined
in Philadelphia. That November, Black students in Philadelphia’s public
schools held a massive demonstration at the city’s Board of Education. (Bisson
writes that Cook went home after only marching a few blocks.) The students
wanted a better and Blacker education. Philadelphia Police Commissioner
Frank Rizzo took a hard-line approach to the more than 3,000 or so students.
Rizzo did his best impersonation of Birmingham’s Eugene "Bull" Connor. "Get
their Black asses!" Rizzo shouted to his virtually all-white storm troopers.
Nightsticks. Broken bones. Blood. No officers punished.

The following year, the young Christian minister from
Alabama was killed for attempting to force the United States government to
re-commit to the War on Poverty. Many young Blacks wanted to avenge his
death. Some did by looting and busting windows in scores of cities.

In the aftermath, thousands of young Blacks had another
idea: they wanted to join that group of radical cats they had heard about in
Oakland. So they set up, or flooded existing, local chapters and branches.
They purchased rifles, Black jackets and Black berets. Since Brother
Martin’s way didn’t work, they thought, let’s try Brother Malcolm’s.

Ungawa. Black Power. A 1968 George Wallace for President
rally in Philadelphia. Cook and his friends booed and hissed Wallace and his
supporters. Some Wallace supporters decided to respond as a gang. A frantic
Cook happily spied a policeman. What happened next Abu-Jamal recalls in his
first book, "Live From Death Row": "The cop saw me on the ground being
beaten to a pulp, marched over briskly—and kicked me in the face." (Cook’s
FBI file, in contrast, stated that Cook struck the officer.)

Another not-so-insignificant event happened in Cook’s
life that year. He was given a new name by one of his high school teachers,
a Kenyan named Timone Ombina. (Later, Cook would add an Arabic surname when
his first child, Jamal, was born three years later.) His new name was a
royal one to Kenyans, one historically identified with leadership and
struggle. Cook took to his nominal rebirth immediately. It coincided with
the new identity created by puberty.

During this time, he discovered something that galvanized
him in all his parts: a weekly tabloid newspaper. Its volatile mixture of
newsprint, words, drawings and pictures stirred the Scout and the United
Nations within him. The newspaper was The Black Panther. Cook’s
life—and, years later, his courtroom struggle to not be put to death—would
be defined by the ideas expressed in its contents.

His attraction and commitment to the Party was complete.
He joined up with some other Black men who could trace their outlines within
the Panther’s shadow. The remaining challenge: customizing a West Coast idea
for Philly. Cook was turning 15. In transition from boy to man, he had begun
an intellectual and activist voyage. By the close of 1970, his adventures
would take him to major cities on both American coasts, create lifelong
friends and enemies, and plant the seeds of a lifelong vocation.

Todd Steven Burroughs, Ph.D. (tburroughs@jmail.umd.edu)
is an independent researcher/writer based in Hyattsville, Md. He is a
primary author of Civil Rights Chronicle (Legacy), a history of the
Civil Rights Movement, and a contributor to Putting The Movement Back
Into Civil Rights Teaching (Teaching For Change/Poverty & Race Research
Action Council), a K-12 teaching guide of the Civil Rights Movement. He is
writing a biography of Abu-Jamal.